Yep. That would be adopting it as-is, believing in its self-described universality, instead of making some reasonable delimitations, exceptions and shortcuts. Any project methodology that recommends exactly the same approach for a low-risk low-effort two person task and a multi-year bet-the-company programme is obviously in need of significant adaptation. Not being a PM myself, I have a hard time believing any of the mature ones actually make this recommendation. Even RUP backed down and clarified these things pretty well, eventually.

Agreed: adopting any methodology as-is is a recipe for disaster. We've seen that in software development with e.g. RUP, which has any number of good ideas, but all to often was interpreted as an all-or-nothing deal. However, spinning your own isn't exactly trivial or fast, either. Add multiple sourcing partners to the mix, and at least starting off with a recognized common framework isn't exactly an idea in the kill-it-with-fire category. Those come later on, when we fail to consider why certain practices are recommended, and abandon common sense!

I've sighed many a times over ITIL's shortcomings, not least in the interface to software development, but am still not tempted to start over from scratch.

However you work, when ad-hoc just won't cut it any more, what is vital is partly what you describe — there's no substitute for skilled and motivated people — but also keeping track of the purpose and vision of why you try to regulate methods in a certain way. Sometimes you need to pare back the methodology to the bare bones, but at other times, you need to pull out all the stops and impose every single control. I believe the word for that is 'leadership'... which is a commodity in critical short supply in most organizations, alas.

Is that still around? I thought when the recession hit most companies realised that one of the first things you should cut is pointless money and time wasting bureaucratic process and just hire people who know what they're on about and have real actual common sense whilst firing those that don't.

Nope. In organizations with more hundreds or thousands of IT people and thousands of systems (not to mention dozens of countries and a handful of sourcing agreements on top), you're gonna need some process to control change and coordinate responsibilities. I'm not saying ITIL is pretty, or should be fully implemented everywhere (perhaps not even anywhere), but doing everything ad hoc, when you can't simply shout at each other across the office, is much, much worse.

Perhaps I'm scaremongering, but are you willing to bet against mission creep from using such intelligence assets against so-called terrorism via kiddie porn to copyright infringement? Given how US election campaigns are being financed?

Any publishers using this technique had better have iron-clad contracts with their authors permitting arbitrary alterations to their works. Otherwise, they are in clear violation of the authors' moral rights to protection against distortion and mutilation of their original work.

It's eerily reiminscent of the 'We had to incinerate the village in order to protect it' military communique.

I'd considered asking you what constitutes a 'real' as opposed to 'pseudo-' nation, but then I realized you might answer. Pray tell, are you sure it isn't the lizard people using chemtrails to convince the Greek population of the existence of global warming? I'm having trouble distinguishing between all the nutty conspiracy theories these days.

"Irrelevant" implies being unnecessary. Last time I looked, taxis and shared cars were still, y'know, actually, cars. If you mean that privately owned cars are unnecessary, you still haven't provided any real arguments for your thesis, only that something else might possibly substitute.

Err... *yes it it*. It's *communication*. Ie it's a passing of information from one person to another, so both people need to understand and agree on the meaning of the words used! (ok, so this particular case the words who and whom are similar enough to be guessed, but if they were very different and the other person didn't understand the obscure & pointless word you used, it's your fault for using it)

What a sad world it would be if language were solely about communicating clear, distinct meanings.

Nonsense. Just because your contemporaries tend to avoid a word is no reason to abstain from it: that's the kind of narrow minded in-crowd attitude no true nerd should ever fall prey to. After all, the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.